Current Activity: TV host of parts of shows such as Prato Fácil (“Easy Dish”) and TodoSabor (“All Flavor”), about gastronomy and culinary, with and without guests, and Simples Assim (“Simple as That”), with several subjects on lifestyle, behavior and conscious consumption.

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What is your impression about a brand called Brazil?

We’re okay, aren’t we? As we have never been before! The obvious signs of such improvement are insistently hammered, incessantly, through reports in all media. I read four newspapers a day, all nationwide. I watch at least three daily TV news, besides keeping my TV permanently attached in a 24 hour news channel (Globonews). And what do I see? I see a sea of ​​roses, occasionally hit by large, and impossible to circumvent, oil stains, that insist on spoil the landscape and the dream of a better country for all. I see what we call “céu de brigadeiro” (“blue and clear skies”) that sometimes becomes inoperative due to large rolls of social smoke preventing a quiet flight with no incidents. But let’s be fair and correct – the profession demands a lot.

We are, in fact, much better in many ways: all my reports are made on the street; I see that the so dreamed access to consuming goods arrived, with all power, for at least 20 million Brazilians who emerged from the least favored classes. I see, also, that we no longer have the famous “mutt complex”, so well, in the 1950s, by the journalist and playwright Nelson Rodrigues, the greatest heritage of our letters and stages. Rodrigues used the expression to write about our almost endemic shame, our sportive lapses and our national craze to feel inferior in relation to more developed countries, to superior cultures and to more enlightened people. All this, if is not over, has been declining since the adoption of a strong currency in 1994. We had crisis after that, as the one of February 1998, which took the country to the large and suspicious queue of troubled nations. We escaped from it again and few news were so broadcasted as the history that the country had provided money to countries that, before, were unsuspected of passing through crisis that we know so well – Spain, Portugal, Greece and Ireland, among others. Not to mention that we offered money to the IMF itself! The day this news came out in the press, it was more or less like winning a World Cup: it means that one of the “ugliest ducklings” of Latin America had the safe open exactly to the institution accused of stifling our economy two decades ago? It was a party – and it has been more or less like this, since then. Until …

Until the damage of the international economy has hit our admiral sea and our blue and clear skies. Until the inflation, represented in the country by a ruthless dragon that had never slept completely, started to peek us with strength and mistrust again. As this kind of news never comes alone, the golden pill, which was already showing signs of fatigue, is losing its veneer that ensures the freshness and vigor of the recent economic achievements – and the best example was the fall of 8% in the until then unabated popularity of our Republic President, Dilma Rousseff. If the “brand Brazil” will live days of bonanza ever seen with the completion of two mega-events (World Cup in 2014 and the Olympics in 2016), we have to run against all odds to put the country in order. And we are at a moment in which efforts may result in few achievements. I’m against the “card-carrying” nihilists, the discouraged of spirit and the defeatists by choice – in short, I’m against those who think the mutt costume fits us really well. But things are not even close to the nirvana that has been preached by official agents from all spheres of power.

Only in the state of São Paulo, the richest and most developed of the Union, there are 3 thousand new men and women imprisoned for months – not always because of heinous crimes, it is true, but not always because of “stealing chickens”. Two months ago I recorded a report in a town with 3 thousand inhabitants in the south of Minas Gerais state. When I praised the cleanliness of the square in which the recording took place, I heard from the responsible for cleaning, from the City Hall, a “thank you” and an explanation: the square is washed every morning due to the intensive and indiscriminate use of crack during the night. Today, Brazil is the country where the drug is most consumed in the world. We live in an unprecedented epidemic: we daily lose youth and adults to the abuse of illicit and licit drugs (alcohol has ruined entire families). Worse: there is a large number of functional addicts among the disadvantaged people; people who use crack and alcohol to increase production in cane cutting and in harvesting of coffee – the result, in practice, was the absurd increase in cases of accidents with work tools, such as sickles and agricultural machinery. Our brand needs urgent and bluntly, of more effective actions – propaganda against it exists, and a lot. But it is known that it has not worked. We cannot be the largest grain producer and the largest exporter of beef in the world, and load on our back perfectly avoidable deaths. We cannot create the expected and praised quota system, which gives equal study opportunities to people of all ethnic groups of our population, repairing many years of inequalities and counter-orders due to social power and/or skin color, while we perceive the emergence of an even greater resentment against those who, historically, have always been priced out of national life and of the decisions of the power center. Not to mention the always unjust and unequal dealings to indigenous issues, which in recent months have left the country in a permanent state of alert.

In the heydays of the Discoveries, Christopher Columbus would have said that Cuba was the most beautiful place in the world. The Brazilians, who know about the story, like to say that the phrase existed only because the fearless Genoese navigator didn’t know Brazil. In fact, we are privileged for having everything that makes a great brand: landscapes that take our breath away, eight thousand kilometers of coastline, the friendly characteristic of our people, the amazing miscegenation that occurred for reasons stronger than pure conviction, our cuisine, our habits and customs. We have countryside, backland and beaches. We have joy, samba, carnival and warmth most of the year. We have the exuberance of our forests. We are recognized as friendly and hospitable. But we cannot push everything else “under the rug”, as if the world sees us with lenses color pink. If there is one thing that the “brand Brazil” needs, and urgently, is more truth, greater transparency and a permanent combat the historical evils that afflict the nation since 1500 (the corruption, the social villainy and the contempt for the least favored, mainly). A country that took 500 years to regulate the profession of domestic workers, precisely those people who wash our clothes, clean our ground and take care of our children, needs to urgently review the image of its brand, otherwise it will “skate” another 500 years in a swamp, full of uncertainties and incorrigible ills.